flesh to you
by Anna Queen
Summary: Beneath You's 'Am I flesh to you' made doubly significant in this reunion between Buffy and a noncorporeal Spike, set in an imagined early AtS Season 5.


**flesh to you**  
  
These days, everything's different at Wolfram and Hart. Even the name. The Angel Corporation, that's what they're calling the LA branch nowadays. Nobody likes the name, but the CEO overruled. Like he says, nobody minded Angel Investigations before.  
  
There's not much use for a state-of-the-art security system, not with friend or foe as tough a call on the inside as it is out. The vampire sensors are long gone, for obvious reasons.  
  
The average visitor can come and go without bringing everything to a standstill.  
  
Not this one.  
  
Not this one because the moment she walks in everything stops, like an intake of breath.  
  
Not this one because every single person in the room turns to look from her to him, senses how acutely aware of her he is, even though he has his back to her.  
  
He turns to face her, words arching carelessly over the silence.  
  
"You alright Slayer? You look like you've seen a ghost."  
  
"God, Spike, are you real?"  
  
He can't answer that one.

* * *

The office is smaller than she'd thought when they first walked in. Intimate.  
  
Intimate would be right. Last time she checked intimate was any space with the two of them in it; a world she could never quite lose herself in because he'd always know how to find her.  
  
And now she's found him, or at least, maybe she has.  
  
The girl called Fred showed them in here. "It's bullet-proof, bug-proof and beast-proof," she'd reassured them. "You won't be disturbed, unless someone walks in on you through the wall." And she'd winked across at Spike.  
  
Buffy feels sick. Sick because she's lived two months of a life she looked on as his gift to her, and now those two months unravel in front of her and she feels like if she doesn't clutch at it, hard, everything before that might slip away too.  
  
She's fighting something, something that might be the very air drawn in and out of her lungs. She doesn't know which she wants more, just then, him or her, because standing there she's so lost she can't find either of them.  
  
The self-assurance he met her with downstairs – struck her across the face with, it felt like, and she's still smarting from it – sits on him less easily up here. He meets her eyes and she's reminded of something, a moment, a look, a word. _Terrified._  
  
"I couldn't get to you."  
  
She knows that already. Wesley – God, that was Wesley? – filled her in with the terse clarity of the once-watcher, taking charge of the situation as she stood, bewildered, in the hallway.  
  
"That's not like you."  
  
He looks hurt.  
  
"I mean, you usually manage to get to me. Nobody else gets under my skin the way you do."  
  
He says nothing, and it hangs in the space between them, because they lost their usually an apocalypse-and-a-half back.  
  
She's wanted him, of course. For the little things as much as anything. Sometimes she'll come out with a line and hear herself wait for the comeback that's out there asking for someone to pick it up. But mostly, she's just been happy. Laughed at her own jokes, because he isn't there to do it for her; laughed at him, at things he's said.  
  
Fingers of memory catch at her hair, at her neck, at her mouth. He moves closer to her, and she hates that eyes that can promise so much, can ask so much, belong to a face that's little more than the air she's struggling to breathe.  
  
"Oh god, don't touch me."  
  
He thinks those are the words. He can't tell because it's not what she's saying, not what she's saying at all.  
  
"You think I can? You think I bloody can?"  
  
The Spike in her head would have shushed her and her protest away. Instead he throws it back at her with a hopelessness that cuts into her. She'd forgotten he could do that.  
  
He bites his lip, the darted half-glance flip-flopping her stomach. "I'm sorry."  
  
She jumps in too fast, words skittering out in a race against her heartbeat. "Don't be sorry. We have enough sorry between us to fill a lifetime or two already. Which we - kinda have, I guess." She stops, says it almost to herself. "Feels like we keep coming back, you and me."  
  
He wraps his hand round the back of his neck, head tilted towards her.  
  
"How's everyone? The little bit?"  
  
"We're OK. We're all OK."  
  
He'd made sure of that. Made sure he left a hole in the world, too. She'd lie awake in the hot, starless nights afterwards, teased by shadows until something more than the knife wound carved through her would ache. Sometimes she'd press her hand against the wound and find it wet with blood, soaked through bandages when his arms around her would staunch it. And she'd trace a name across the pillow beside her, black painted on white in the darkness, blood-wet fingers that would have lingered against a mouth prised open with kisses.  
  
She's so conscious of them now, fingers clenched by her sides as she watches the light tangle in his hair, remembers the weight of his head in her hands, against her skin, between – oh god, not now, not now when she can't so much as touch him.  
  
"Can I get you a drink?"  
  
Once upon a time the Spike she knew would have asked her that question in a gesture and a raised eyebrow that would have offered her more than the bottle tipped towards her. This Spike looks straight through her, and she hears herself reply to him as if he was a stranger.  
  
"Are you having one?"  
  
"Vampire, remember."  
  
"Since when has that stopped you?"  
  
"Ghost, remember."  
  
She looks across at him, and he looks back, this time, and suddenly she's smiling, because in spite of the hopelessness there's more than a glimmer of the Spike she knew there after all.  
  
"Coffee would be good. Do you have coffee?"  
  
"Machine in the corner. You want the button that says 'coffee'. We're not big on subtle here."  
  
"Coffee machine? You have gone up in the world."  
  
"Well, you know, I did save the world. So I figure I earnt it."  
  
She pours herself a cup, takes a sip.  
  
"It's good coffee."  
  
"It ought to be. It bloody hurt, saving the world."  
  
There are so many things she should say, like _thank you_, and _loved you_, and _missed you_, but she doesn't know where to start. What is there she can add without taking away from what's been said already? I love you was meant to last forever, not until they next ran into each other.  
  
He's still talking, which is just the Spike she remembers. "You're lucky. Up here you still have the Wolfram and Hart cups. Down in the foyer they're talking about getting Peaches' ugly mug printed on the side of them. It's enough to make anyone start drinking blood instead."  
  
Angel.  
  
"He didn't tell me you were here."  
  
It's dismissed more lightly than she could ever have imagined. "He's in denial. Most of the time, he tells himself I'm not here." He grins. "So what are you doing here?"  
  
"Shopping."  
  
"Get anything nice?"  
  
"Not yet." There's light dancing at the back of her eyes as she says it, and she's looking straight at him.  
  
"You've been in – "  
  
"Rome. Milan, some of the time. London before that. And Paris."  
  
"And you come to LA to shop?"  
  
"Everybody comes to LA to shop."  
  
He laughs, and she smiles back at him as she explains. "Giles sent me. There's a potential slayer round here somewhere I have to find."  
  
"You're _still_ collecting them? What do you need them for now? We did win, right?"  
  
She nods, smiling at him with a tenderness worn brighter than he remembers. "Because of you."  
  
He knows what that's an answer to, acknowledges it as he meets her eyes, turns it back to her with a wicked flicker of a grin.  
  
"For me? I appreciate the thought, Slayer, but I don't want them. I've seen what they did to your bathroom."  
  
"Like you never left wet towels on the floor."  
  
"How would you know? No, don't tell me right now. Save it for – somewhere that doesn't have Angel's name on the contract, for a start. Although, on second thoughts - "  
  
She giggles in spite of her self, and he goes on.  
  
"It's not like I could even use them for snacks." There's an edge to the sigh he gives that she knows is real. "You know, I'd kill for a pint of fresh blood right now."  
  
"You'd have to."  
  
He smirks at her a little.  
  
"Not the only thing I'm missing."  
  
It's hardly a solution, but she goes over to him, rests her coffee cup on the desk he's standing in front of, swings herself up beside him.  
  
She's gotten used to being treated like a lady. When she walks into a room she holds her head up high, conscious of the cut of her dress, the way she walks in heels, the swing of her hair on her back. She's saved the world often enough to feel like the world owes her a little respect.  
  
She doesn't feel any of that now. Doesn't feel anything but the weight of her own skin on her body, and feels it like it's the thing that's keeping her in, that's keeping him out. And she hates that because not so very long ago her skin on his meant them together.  
  
"Can you take the coat off?"  
  
He widens his eyes in mock disbelief. "Woah, Slayer. What happened to foreplay?"  
  
"No, I mean, can you?"  
  
"Buffy - "  
  
"I'm just – I'm trying to understand, Spike. I'm trying to get my head round this, trying to work out what we - what happens next."  
  
"There's a next?"  
  
"There's always a next. We both know that."  
  
"You're making it sound very easy."  
  
A slow smile spreads across her face.  
  
"You know the way it works. Rubber ball. I say bounce, you say – "  
  
"- how high."  
  
For the first time in two months she's forgotten everything except the fact that she's a woman, and she's sat there trembling with the knowledge of it.  
  
He knows what's in her eyes; he's seen it before, but his words are measured and precise. "I don't have a body."  
  
"There's a mirror on the wall over there that'll tell you otherwise."  
  
"If I had a reflection it might."  
  
"Fine, there's a girl on the desk here that'll tell you otherwise."  
  
She tilts her head towards him, and she can almost believe she could rest it against him. She's so conscious of him filling the space beside her, space that isn't soft like the pillow she'd hold to her when he was gone, doesn't give as she presses against it.  
  
"Spike."  
  
"Buffy."  
  
She looks down, scuffing her heels on the edge of the desk.  
  
"Don't let go of me."  
  
"I don't."  
  
"I didn't let go of you."  
  
He answers without a beat. "I know."  
  
She stretches out her hand almost involuntarily, and she gasps.  
  
Gasps, and bites her lip, and hangs onto him, to the look in his eyes, because suddenly it hurts.  
  
Hurts because the fingers locked into hers are pressed against a scar that won't heal, and they're strong, and firm, and whole.


End file.
